Today's guest blog comes from Anthony Pensabene, an SEO expert, who is breaking down how to create content that not only drives traffic to your website, but is content your audience actually cares about.

You’ve heard content is important.

But what’s next? What’s your next piece of content going to be about?

Many small businesses choose topics related to services or products. Alternatively, some choose topics based on current events or the interests of staff.

All of those are fine, yet these businesses wonder why that content is not driving traffic or kindling interest after initial publish.

Below, you’ll learn three ways to create content that:

Your target market cares about

Drives traffic to your site

Answer Questions

Many businesses seek SEO services to rank better for competitive terms related to services and products. However, query-related content is a great way to drive traffic and the interest of people who are in the sales funnel.

So rather than attempt to rank for a product or service term, you want a piece of content to rank well in addressing a customer’s question or concern.

Let’s use a sneaker supplier as an example. It’s very likely generic words like ‘sneakers’ or ‘womens sneakers’ will be too competitive. Similarly, any brand name such as ‘Nike’ or ‘Vans’ will be super competitive.

What’s a small businessperson to do? Answer questions that customers have related to the product or service.

Start toying with Google’s autosuggest function.

Place words how to, when, and what before a term.

There’s no limit to what you can find. Below, I’m going through the alphabet, putting ‘b’ next to ‘how to’:

2. AnswerthePublic is a cool content tool that gives a grand idea of the kind of information people want to know around any topic.

Let’s use the topic of car insurance. We put ‘car insurance’ in the tool, choose US for country origin, and we’re provided with 157 questions.

At this point, you may wonder which topics to choose. To further target content, consider the search volume and competition level.

Copy and paste queries into Google’s Keyword Planner to get monthly search volume and a better idea of how difficult it will be to rank for the term.

Get Peripheral

3. Let’s use Google Analytics to learn more about our site visitors’ interests.

In Analytics, go to Audience → Interests → Affinity Categories

Basically, Google segments site visitors by their overall search behavior. It’s a nice way to generate peripheral topic ideas.

So let’s say we have a clothing business and identify Home Decor Enthusiast as an affinity category. Our customers shop for clothes, but according to Google data, they also visit home interior sites, buy home goods, etc.

You can get creative in combining your service or product with identified affinity categories. Or, you could use a content ideation tool like Hubspot’s.

Here are some ideas:

Boom! Now, you have three new ways to generate topics and a bunch of new tools to try!

Anthony Pensabene has been working in digital marketing since 2007. He helps his boss, Dan Shure, with the Experts on the Wire podcast.